Modern Day Plato

Modern Day Version of Plato's Cave Allegory-

Recently, I've been reading a lot of philosophy and worldview resources for school. As I was reading Plato's Cave Allegory, it hit me that this is confusing stuff. No wonder most people don't want to study philosophy, it's hard to understand! When I first read this allegory a few years ago, I had no idea what I had just read. After reading it for a second time, I feel like I grasp it a little better. So I decided to write a modern day version just in case there are some other confused people out there.

Imagine you're in a cave and you're all chained up and all you can see is this wall.

And the jerks who chained you up are using a fire to create shadow puppets on the wall, just to mess

with your mind. After a while of being chained up and looking at this wall, you get used to how the shadow puppets perform, and you form your understanding of reality on these shadows. These shadow puppets are all you've ever known, so you don't know that there is an entirely different world out there.

So eventually someone comes along and unchains and takes you out into the real world and you're super confused. At first you can't see anything; the sun is blinding you. Then you realize that actually you couldn't see anything if there wasn't a sun! Then you see a tree, except you don't know its a tree, because you've only ever seen a shadow of a tree, so you ask the person who unchained you what it is. When he tells you it’s a tree, you laugh and tell him it's not a tree, you know what a tree looks like, and this ain’t it...

Finally after a while you'd realize that nothing you saw on the wall was real...it was only a shadow of what was real. So you run back to the cave to tell the others who are still chained up. 'Cept when you get back and start explaining stuff to them, they all think you're stupid. You describing what a tree looks like. You'd tell them a tree is green and brown. They look with empty eyes and ask “Dude...what’s green? What’s brown?” They point to the wall and say, “That's a tree.” You look at the wall, but now you can't see at all because the sun has been messing with your eyes. So they all laugh at you and call you stupid, and won’t leave the wall.

This is what Philosophy is like, according to Plato. The soul ascends and apprehends the forms and the idea that “the idea of good” gives light to everything else. Then the philosopher has to go back to the world of forms – the wall – and try to explain to people what 'the good' is...but these idiots don't even know what 'brown' is so they don't understand something as complex as ' the good'.

Plato's point is that 'the good' is out there, and everyone has to find it for themselves. You can't force knowledge on an idiot...he has to find it on his own.

“True knowledge must be obtained the hard way, and some people just don't want to see the light”